Investing in the Future

With everything going on in the world, we consider ourselves very fortunate that 2021 has been an exciting year of growth. We expanded our services, deepened our leadership capacity, and made significant investments in our ecommerce practice. I think the only thing we are more excited about in 2022 is this damn pandemic finally coming to an end.

I am thrilled to finally be able to share details around what we have been working on. 

Growth in client services leadership

Our longtime leader of the Strategy and Project Management teams, Jen Slemp, has been promoted to become our first-ever Chief Operations Officer (COO). In her time at Third and Grove, Jen has grown into a relentless advocate for an uncompromising standard of quality in our work and in everything we do in client engagement.
 

In her new role, Jen will focus on our entire delivery operation, what we are calling the client experience (one of TAG’s three pillars, along with the people experience, for our team and the prospect experience). Our engineering, strategy, creative, and project management teams will be reporting up through Jen. Our clients will see more collaborative and effective project delivery with closely-aligned, cross-functional teams.

Working side-by-side with Jen and watching her execute has made me a better leader. I am forever grateful for how much she has taught me and for what I will continue to learn from her. Our delivery operation could not be in better hands, and I am excited for our clients to feel the impact of Jen’s unified leadership.

Growth in commerce, strategy, quality assurance, and engineering

Strategy

I am thrilled to announce that Monica Thompson has joined our team as our new Director of Strategy.

Monica is a sought-after expert around digital strategy, performance marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).
 

She brings years of experience and will be working closely with our clients to deliver remarkable results around B2B lead generation, engagement, conversion, and impact for our B2B, D2C, and CPG clients.

We will have some exciting announcements about our expanded capabilities very soon. Stay tuned!

Quality

Walter Steed has joined us as our Director of Quality Assurance. He brings with him a passion for website accessibility and baking QA into the development process; Walter has quickly enhanced how we approach testing client projects.
 

Having Walter join the team represents a major growth for the maturation of our large scale development operation for mid-market and enterprise clients. Though not as immediately apparent as design and strategy to an end-user visitor, his impacts can be seen across all of our development projects. Indeed, when you visit a website and don’t experience any issues, you have just witnessed the kind of remarkable QA process that Walter brings.

Engineering

Our engineering team has grown to service multiple platforms, including Drupal, Gatsby, React, other headless frameworks, complex migrations, custom integrations, and Shopify Plus; we decided to bring on a single Director-level leader for our tech team.

I am excited to announce that Brent Schultz has joined us as our new Director of Engineering. Brent brings a deep expertise in open source content management, headless, and leadership that he forged over a career at large and boutique agencies running large engineering teams and large implementations.
 

Commerce

Marc Andreessen likes to say software is eating the world. In the world of commerce, the story is somewhat different but no less exciting: Shopify is eating the world of commerce.

There are a variety of major Shopify milestones in the world of digital commerce this year to highlight, but the most telling is: The cumulative traffic to stores on Shopify has now exceeded the total website traffic to Amazon.com. As Shopify’s impact has grown and is felt throughout the market this year, our practice has grown, and it was time to invest further in that growth.
 

Our leading Shopify Plus practice is entering a new chapter: I am thrilled to announce that Nina Collier has joined our team as our new Director of eCommerce.

Nina brings an enormous amount of expertise to TAG. With a background in marketing and merchandising, Nina has spent the last eight years focused on the ecommerce and direct-to-consumer space, leading multidisciplinary agency teams, focused on everything from experience design to full stack development, account, and project management, strategy, and analytics.
 

Her previous client portfolios spanned a wide range of sizes and verticals —from small, upcoming fashion digitally native vertical brands to large, enterprise CPG companies.

Nina will be bringing all of this expertise to our clients, along with her strategic guidance, which already has a proven track record of sales growth and customer engagement.

Now let’s move onward to 2022!